1.
Once, way back when,
winter won.
Earth was hard as iron,
water like a stone for something like one
hundred million years. Persephone
must have been depressed,
and postponed all her travel plans
indefinitely. The long commute. The stress
of being sexy and bipolar, bouncing gloom
to joie de vivre to gloom the same
old same old volleyball. Enough.
She settled down to life with grim
ultramafic Death.
Up on Earth
the glaciers grew to ice caps, snow
on snow, the ice caps to ice fields,
ice prairies, pampas, veldts, albedo
ramped to the max, Sun’s
billets-doux returned to space unread.
So much for that biosphere,
some passing astral being might have said,
inert and gorgeous, a dead movie star,
a tempting but inedible meringue.
And they’d be wrong
in the long term. Why? Let all who dwell
on the blue-green planet celebrate
the mother magma churning at its heart,
the home fires that kept burning and at length undid
that cold Precambrian spell.
2.
In the middle of the frozen pond
we pause: blow noses;
tighten snowshoes. Around us
snowdevils skirmish and disperse.
Loose tresses sift, braiding, un-
braiding, and where
the ice is bare the slant sun,
like a glass eye,
glances. Biology is elsewhere,
busy with its death-birth
buzz. Here we are simple citizens
of Snowball Earth, the cosmic disco ball
and nun. Listen: : that mix
of hush and scratch is time
clocklessly elapsing. In a minute
our mammal-selves will come back
bearing tales of frostbite
and heartbreak. For now
just winter pre-echoing the infinite.